Slavery and slave trade, 1450-1650

In 1450, approximately 20 to 25 million persons lived in relative stability in West Africa. This population, while divided into numerous ethnic, linguistic and political communities, was at the same time interconnected with ties of trade, migration and religious affiliation. For thousands of years, West African populations had developed their societies in the overlapping zones of forest, savanna and desert edge; and among their many social institutions and structures existed some that could be called ‘slavery’, in that war captives, pawns and other dependants were held in subservience by individuals, families and states. While historians have little direct evidence for these early antecedents of West African slavery, it is clear that the small scale of slavery in West Africa contrasted with the far more developed systems of slavery in the regions of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Middle East. Holding people in captivity could succeed only if the captors had substantial resources and substantial incentives to carry out this oppression. Slavery could expand only if connected to significant demand for captive labor - brought about by the ability of a monarchy to extract servile labor, or by the existence of markets for slave-produced goods, or through purchasers who would carry captives a distance to where these conditions could be obtained.

In 1450 all three of these conditions arose along the Sahara fringe. The declining kingdom of Mali and the rising kingdom of Borno gathered, exploited and exported captives, as is documented in Arabic-language records. For the rest of West Africa, slavery became a major factor only after 1550, when trans-Atlantic encounters brought collapse of Amerindian populations and a resulting demand for African labor.

Europeans voyaging to the West African littoral found that they were able to seize and purchase captives, and gradually increased the number of their purchases. An estimated 600 persons per year were taken from the West African coast between 1450 and 1500, and this number grew steadily for three centuries. By 1650 the European purchases of enslaved West Africans had risen to about 4,000 per year, a number more than six times greater than maritime slave exports in 1500, and which equaled the number of captives sent from West Africa across the Sahara in 1650.